our baby is growing up

We are finished with elementary schools at our house. Our "baby" graduated from middle school yesterday. Isn't she cute? . . . . no, make that gorgeous!

jinxed, i spoke too soon

setting: our dark bedroom

time: 3:30 am

words that I heard coming from someone in our room, I couldn't quite make out who: "mom . . . dad . . . water . . . . all over . . . heard water running . . . .wake up . . . wet . . . everywhere . . . hurry . . . "

me: "Wha ???"

When Dave and I finally became coherant, we discovered water all over the kitchen, pantry, bathroom, hallway and through the wall into the bedroom closet. At 3:30 am, we got out the wet/dry vacuum and sucked up gallons and gallons of water. At 4:00 am, I emptied my closet. At 4:20 am we pulled up the carpet in my closet and sucked gallons of water out of the padding. At 4:40 we mopped, wiped and dried the floor. At 5:05 am as the sun was beginning to lighten the horizon, we crawled back in to bed.

Yesterday, we had completed some floor tile behind the refridgerator, hooked up the water line to the fridge at 7 pm. Sometime after midnight, the water line let loose and it was spewing water for who knows how long. Why couldn't that have happened during the evening while we were sitting right there?

ok - I have decided I'm going to stop complaining. I am just writing this as a prelude to the following list of blessings:

• The bottom of the pantry got scrubbed clean.


• The floor of my closet is getting a full spring cleaning.


• Dave owns every tool known to man. Because of this (sometimes annoying) fact, we had a wet/dry vacuum handy at a moment's notice.


• The toilet had not been set yet. Because the floor drain was still open, the water eventually got deep enough to flow into the bathroom and down the drain thus keeping the water from being 2 feet deep.


• Nothing in my closet got significantly wet. The pad under the carpet was holding an enormous amount of water, but it had not soaked up through carpet much yet.


• Melanie is a light sleeper and she can warn us of emergencies in the night. Thank you Mel. (It could have been very bad by morning.)
  
• If our house was perfectly square and level, the water may have flowed toward the living room carpet. Yay for an old lop-sided house!


• I don't get to see the sunrise very often. It was lovely.

happy day

It is a happy day at our house. We have tile up. I know . . . it's just tile, but it makes me deeply and truly happy. I can see a possibility of working plumbing by the end of the week.

While we were out cleaning the buckets and tile saw, some shenanigans began:

And I got Melanie to clean the car, too. Go Mel !!

Life is good.

dave, the birthday boy

I went to the movies last night to celebrate my husband's birthday and to enjoy a fun family night night out.

The girls, however, went to the movies last night to see Shia Lebeouf.

Dave was living in Japan when the first Indiana Jones came out. He hadn't seen a movie in two years and Indiana Jones was the first one he saw when he got home. I saw it in college. It was a sold out theater and the only seats available were in the front row, about 4 feet from the huge screen. My room-mates and I watched it all evening craning our heads back and forth to see the action on the whole screen. That was a long time ago. And Harrison Ford can still pull it off.

when it rains, it pours

I wish life would just settle down for a bit. I mean really. Could I just enjoy one day of grocery shopping, reading a magazine, or even cleaning toilets?

But no.

Today's list of problems include the following:

The air conditioning system in our house is dripping water through the sheetrock. And Dave's windshield is shattered.

I think Suzanne had a point - there is a dark vortex around our house these days and we may need an exorcism before long.

btw - Dave hit a big hawk on the freeway coming home from Flagstaff this evening. He and Rachel were fine . . . the hawk - not so fine.

more embarrassing moments

Click here to read about Rachel's most embarrassing moment (well . . . her many, many moments!)

memorable moments

My sister tagged me for my most embarrassing moment. (I wish I had an embarrassing picture to post like Lauri did!)
I don't want to do this alone, so I'm dragging everyone in this house to write one. Oh - and I tag Shando too.
Ok, so I have some issues with my body. I like to swim, but I don't like lounging in public in swimwear. Having said that, we were vacationing in a far away state and decided to spend the day at a water park with our kids. I decided that for one day, I would relax and just enjoy the day. We were far away from home, I didn't know anyone, there was no reason to feel self conscious.

I am at the top of a slide and some 10 year old boys are talking. I saw that some people were going down the slide sitting up, and some people were laying back. I got these boys to recommend which way I should go down the slide because I wanted to go down slow. They started kidding me that if I laid back I would go slower. I could clearly see that was not the case so I was teasing them back and saying I would clearly have to do the opposite of their advice. We were kidding back and forth for some time until it was my turn to go down the slide. So I went first, my kids were next in line watching me, the whole group of boys were watching and the 16 year old with a whistle life guard at the top and the bottom of the slide were watching. This was not a sign-a-waiver, death-defying type of slide. It was just a medium type slide with a little bumpity bump in the middle for a thrill. Apparently the the little bump, I got off balance, tipped backwards, hit the back of my head on the slide and sloshed into the trough at the bottom unconscious. There was soon a whole group gathered, directed by the little teen-aged life guards. They had to call around the park on the loud speaker looking for Dave etc etc. Quite an attention getter.

Looking back now, I probably should have had some real medical attention instead of being cared for by the minimum wage first aid girl. I was feeling quite loopy and my sense of time and space was off for several hours. The kids thought it was great because they got a premium picnic spot and free pizza and sodas.

OK - Here's Melanie:

Okay. So my first time to the temple was a fantastic experience... Soo, the young women were in the chapel waiting area, right?? okay, so here's the thing, it was last year by the way. So when we were waiting, I had to do what any human has to do. I had to pee... so as you know it was the temple, and there is lots of elderly people helping out. So I asked to leave and went out to the facilities with two of my friends. When I came back into the room where everyone was sitting and waiting, some of my other friends started to laugh when I went by them. So I looked at them, but we had to be quiet. I asked them why they were laughing. Thankfully, I was standing in a corner because they told me to look at the back of my skirt. My skirt has two layers, the outer layer is see-through and the under layer is not. The one that is not see through got stuck in my undies as I came back from the bathroom. So picture this - all of the people I walked by probably saw my legs and my colorful undies. . . . . . :DDD

weather

I don't get the weather lately. I was up in Utah a couple weeks ago. On Wednesday night in Provo, I drove throught this: And the next day, I would have very much enjoyed an outfit like this:Unfortunately, I had packed my "it's the month of May already, and I come from the desert" outfit. It was so cold out, I spent some free time indoors doing this:While I was enjoying the BYU Museum of Art, I ran across this:
Remember Seth and Maurine Horne? I thought it was cool to run across their names in the museum.

On Friday, I was enjoying this:

The flowers seemed to have survived the snow flurry. The weather had warmed up and my short-sleeved shirt was absolutely fine. I enjoyed walking around the campus all day long.

It is always fun to be up at Women's Conference. I went with my cousin (well, Dave's cousin) from Washington. We had a great time there and kept busy from sun up until way late into the night. Who wants to go next year?
Our weather has been weird here at home, too. We barely made it to Easter weekend without the air conditioning to cool off our sweltering house in the afternoons, but as I am sitting here over a month later, I am almost shivering.

I got a text message from Brady today. He said "Look what we woke up to this morning!"

Weird.